The time is right for public sector IT managers to make a major impact on the remodelling of public services against the backdrop of huge cuts to be announced in next week’s national public spending review, former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Blair of Boughton told delegates at this week’s Society of IT Management (Socitm) annual conference....

Residents in the London borough of Redbridge want to see their local council cut its spending on environment, regeneration, culture and leisure activities, and increase its use of electronic service delivery to save money, according to the ongoing results of new online ‘participatory budgeting’ software used by the council....

The question of whether ‘crowdsourcing’ techniques - inviting open online comment from the public - are a meaningful way to develop government policy is one of the main topics of debate at this year’s Future Democracy ’10, Headstar’s annual event on the use of the internet and other new technologies to boost democracy....

NEWS IN BRIEF:

Patient Expansion: Patient Opinion, the award-winning web service allowing NHS patients to ‘tell their stories’ about their experiences with local services and interact with the managers of the services themselves to push for improvements, is set to expand its audience. In a partnership with the public service information platform Looking Local, Patient Opinion will now also be accessible through digital interactive TV (DiTV) and mobile phones. Beginning in the Sefton area, the service will soon be available to all of Looking Local's 125 partners around the UK:

Geo Dragons: Ordnance Survey, the UK’s national mapping agency, is asking the public for ideas on how geographic data can be used to improve and lower the environmental impact of public transport, in the latest instalment of its annual ‘GeoVation’ challenge. A £25,000 prize is available to develop the best entries, many of which are expected to be based on open datasets released by public bodies such as Data.gov, Ordnance Survey’s OS Open Data portal, and Transport for London. The challenge runs until 26 November, with shortlisted entries pitching for funding in a ‘Dragons’ Den’-style event next year:

KuneAgi Esperanto: A new online software tool for creating and developing collaborative political and democratic proposals has been launched. KuneAgi (a phrase in Esperanto translating as "to do things together") is a free system whereby anyone can propose an idea to be developed and refined by other members. The system works autonomously, with no central administrator, and therefore, according to its website, "with no risk of having speech or power being confiscated by this administrator":

Online petitioning or e-petitioning is often advanced as a way of making it easier and more transparent to petition governments, parliaments or other official bodies. According to the 2009 Oxford Internet Survey, petitions are in fact the most frequent form of online civic participation by internet users. But what relationship do e-petitions hold with online social networks, and what does this relationship tell us about e-petition uptake? In an edited version of an upcoming paper for the Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy journal, four authors from the Department of Information Systems and Computing at Brunel University seek to find out, via a data collection tool....

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